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Saturday, April 19, 2014

The Road to Tribeca 2014: App (a short), directed by Alexander Berman

APP follows Paul, a shy engineer who desperately needs venture capital for his virtual wingwoman app and sets out to prove that his app works. The film was the recipient of the 2013 Alfred P. Sloan Production Grant and is the AFI thesis film from Harvard University graduate, Alexander Berman.

What made you decide to become a
filmmaker?

My father is a novelist and
playwright so I grew up surrounded by his stories. When my family moved from
Russia, my father wrote to preserve the life and identity he left behind for
another country, but I was too young to feel Russian and too foreign to feel
American. I started filmmaking at a very young age as a way to make sense of my
environment – to insert myself in proxy into a place I didn’t belong.

Tell us about your film (include
title of film and category your film will play at Tribeca). What inspired you
to make it?

My film, “App” (in shorts
competition at Tribeca), was inspired by an ugly breakup experience as so many
films are! My girlfriend and I had one of those mutual/amiable/bullshit
breakups that leave you with a nagging feeling that there is an untold story.
Out of jealous curiosity, I used her passwords to search through her email,
Facebook, twitter, instagram – the entire contents of her digital mind – to see
if she had every cheated on me. When I told her about it later, she laughed and
said she had done the same too me. The real data apocalypse isn’t NSA spying or
high frequency trading…it’s when we confront our fear of rejection by destroying
the uncertainty that is fundamental to love.

What do you love about your film?

I love its prescience. While
I was developing the film a year ago, Tinder, LuLu, Zoosk, and other location
based relationship startups were slides on an investment deck and not the
multimillion-dollar companies they are today. The film is a comedy if you
think, “This is so ridiculous and impossible!” It’s a horror film when you
realize the future is now.

How long did it take you to make
your film?

My producer, Edouard de
Lachomette, and I started developing the idea for the film in January 2012. The
American Film Institute has a long development process, so we started shooting
in November, wrapped reshoots in January 2013, and delivered in June 2013: a
total of 1.5 years.

What was the most challenging part
of the filmmaking process and how did you overcome it?

My favorite films are the
sci-fi movies that feel like they can happen the day after tomorrow. Trouble
is…you start developing a film a year before you shoot it so you run the risk
that whatever technology you are satirizing feels too stale or too unbelievable
by the time you finish. We went through a ton of drafts of augmented reality,
computer implants, etc… until we settled on “Sexy Siri”. My animator on the film,
Benjamin Berman, is an app developer himself and really helped me conceptualize
what the dating apps of 2014 will feel like back in 2012.

Tell us about your experience
getting into Tribeca.

It’s actually a funny story:
I get an email from Sharon (lead shorts programmer) that says, paraphrased,
“What is the premiere status of your film? But don’t take this question to mean
we are programming you or anything else dot dot dot.” After a nail-biting week
of anticipation, I get a call from Ben Thompson confirming that the film was
accepted. At the American Film Institute, our entire crew is fellow students so
it was an awesome feeling sharing the news with them because we are all
starting our careers together.

If you had to make the film all
over again, would you do anything different?

If I made the film today, it
would be completely different because the technology is so different. I’m very
interested in augmented reality (like the Oculus Rift and Google Glass) and
have a number of projects on the question of what immersive VR does to our
emotional experience of the people we love.

What’s next for your film? Do you
have distribution? If so, when and how can people see it and if not, what are
your hopes for the film?

Our film has some other
exciting festival announcements to make after Tribeca and some distributors
have approached us. At the same time, I want our film to be seen by largest
audience possible while it’s still relevant so we’ve also been exploring a
general Internet release. I hope the success of the short film enables me to
make my feature project. Stay tuned!

Can you provide any advice to other
filmmakers who dream of getting their films made?

Working in movies a
lot of times can feel like a crapshoot. After suffering your first failures, it’s
easy to believe the advice that talent and handwork is not enough – that you
need to “know” the right people or have a lot of “luck”. That’s bullshit. I
truly believe the people who are my role models were the people who had the
highest capacity for pain, rejection, and failure. They kept making when others
told them it was time to quit. It’s a war for talent out there. But it’s a war
won through attrition.

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About Me

Jane Kelly Kosek has been an indie film producer for over a decade. Check out her blog for what it's like to be an indie filmmaker and novelist and the challenges of earning a living as an independent storyteller.